In the computer art, users often need to employ the computing facilities of a service provider to satisfy their computing needs. For example, one or more users, each utilizing one or more applications, may contract with a service provider to request that the service provider perform transaction, processing using the service provider's computing facilities. For a variety of economic and technical reasons, the service provider typically employs a server farm that comprises of a plurality of servers to service the transaction requests from the users. In an example case, each user may contract with the service provider to require the service provider to provide a certain contracted processing rate or a contracted service level e.g. 1000 transactions per second, 100 transactions per second, and 10 transactions per second, etc.
Generally speaking, the service provider desires to provide at least the contracted transaction processing rate to each customer to keep the customers happy. However, there is also a strong need to manage the traffic (e.g., transactions) such that no user would be able to grossly abuse his contractual arrangement by vastly exceeding his contracted transaction processing rate. If the traffic is not properly managed by the service provider, the volume of incoming transactions may result in clogged traffic at the servers in the server farm. Due to the clogged traffic, transaction processing performance may be reduced, and a user who legitimately pays for his/her contracted transaction processing rate may not be able to satisfactorily process transactions, leading to reduced customer satisfaction.